COMIN' UP
TALON PASCAL Culture Keeper
words :: Feet Banks
Born and raised in Mount Currie, Talon and his friends started their pit house—a foursided log pyramid built over a twelve-foot by twelve-foot hole in the ground—in the summer of 2020. Their goal was to build it in a manner as close to the traditional Lil’wat style as possible—something that hadn’t been done in years. “Nowadays, most people don’t really know about how things were done in the past,” Talon says. “Like, with this pit house, we got the design from ethnographic accounts from
Talon Pascal has been described as “an elder’s soul shining out from a 17-yearold’s body,” and his passion for rediscovering traditional Lil’wat Nation culture and art certainly supports this. But get him out in the bush, putting in long hours peeling logs on a traditional-style istken, or pit house, and the conversation can turn to Talon in traditional Lil'wat attire with his handmade bow and arrows. BRITTANY ANDREW more teenager-y topics, like snipers. “Did you know the deadliest sniper in World War I was an Ojibwa named Francis anthropologists and old books.” Pegahmagabow?” Talon asks as he places a new roofing log onto the Talon’s desire to learn the traditional skills and techniques of his main house structure. “He had 378 confirmed kills and over 100 more ancestors shines equally bright through his other artistic passion— unconfirmed.” since age 11 he’s been making traditional Lil’wat-style short bows, History, it turns out, is a passion of Talon’s. He intends to study arrows, and even knives. archaeology after he graduates, and has already accompanied “My parents don’t hunt with a bow,” he says. “I hardly know a team from Simon Fraser University on an archaeological anyone who does. But when I was a kid, I was really interested in investigation/excavation of a Lil’wat village site on what’s now known making my own bow. I was researching English longbows and my dad as Signal Hill, above Pemberton. Artifacts recovered suggest the said, ‘Hey, we used to make bows around here too you know.’ And village was inhabited 200-375 years ago. that was the start of it.”
41
